Home Automation

Backups

So.. Last night started the same as many others.. Home from work, and decided to catch up on some of my web development. Working closely in the innards’ of WordPress and testing my changes on the fly, the WordPress plugin SuperCache was starting to cause me a headache.

So I figured I’d go disable it.. I logged onto the admin page, headed over to the plugin’s and started to disable that and a few others I no longer used. Now here came the strange part.. My Safari browser crashed out completely, and threw me out of the admin panel..

So I opened it back up and headed back over to my site.. To my complete horror the site was no longer available, all I got was directory listings! My heart sank almost immediately, and that went from bad to worse when I realised other sites on the same hosting account had also gone down!

Panic stricken I booted up my FTP client to check out my latest backup.. Luckily I had done one a few nights before, however this was a full backup and not just a site level one. Thus meaning it was a gigantic 5GB+ in size.. Now on an 8MBps ADSL connection downloading the 5GB file to extract and re-upload the files needed would have been a complete nightmare!

Which is when the lightbulb came on above my head, I remember this time last year I had switched to one of FreeVirtualServers top packages, which came complete with a subscription to R1Soft’s Continuous Data Protection server. Although I knew it was there, I’d never needed it in the past.

I gingerly logged on to my control panel, and headed over to the bright R1Soft logo, glowing as if knowing it was there to save the day! Sure enough, though I’d never done anything with it, it had been merely sat there backing up my site and add-on domains as well! Not only that but had several earlier backups to choose from.

FANTASTIC I thought – my data isn’t gone for ever after all! Now.. As I have a large file system on the server I knew this was going to take sometime.. So I selected the files and folders I needed restoring and hit the ‘start’ button, and that was it.. Off it went, restoring files almost instantaneously. Finally I could rest easy in the knowledge not only had I invested in quality hosting and support but I’d also invested in quality backup software to boot!

Within minutes my sites started coming back online.. What’s better is… I set this off, and then went to bed! Left it to its own devices and come the morning my whole world had been restored!

My advice to you is….. If your current hosting provider doesn’t offer R1Soft’s backup solution, then move providers and consider FreeVirtualServers, and if they do – then what are you waiting for?? Sign up!!

For now my SuperCache is still disabled – and will remain so until I have ironed out the bugs.